‘This grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, also known as hibakusha, is receiving the peace prize for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.’
Nobel Prize Committee, awarding the peace prize on 11 October 2024
There's been little coverage of the Nobel Prize committee's decision to award its Peace Prize to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japanese atom bomb survivors group, as if this decision was little more than remembrance of their suffering eighty years ago. Let's hope that national leaders will understand its real purpose: a deeply significant warning to national leaders who have nuclear weapons at their disposal, and to those who are intent on joining that nuclear ‘club’, not to contemplate their use in any circumstances.
Five countries were considered nuclear weapon states under the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty: the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China. Other states that possess nuclear weapons are India, Pakistan and North Korea, and Israel is generally understood to have them as well; meanwhile Iran is thought to be close to joining this group of nations.
With such major conflicts now taking place in both Russia/Ukraine and the Middle East, the clear understanding that nuclear weapons are not to be used — what the Nobel committee referred to as a ‘taboo’ — is under real threat: their quote is, ‘It is alarming that today this taboo is under pressure’.
One can envisage several scenarios which underpin their concern: the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons in either of the current conflicts or those yet to emerge, or a ‘backs against the wall’ scenario where the continued existence of a small country was in threat. Either way, it's a slippery slope to a much more serious situation.
In these commentaries we often call for real and practical initiatives for peace-making, but the Nobel committee is absolutely correct in drawing our attention to the bigger picture which could threaten the very continuation of humanity.
The journey taken by Scandinavia to their current pre-eminent position as an advocate for world peace is interesting, to say the least. Most of the northern hemisphere can trace its civilisation back to enterprising — and warlike — Viking ancestors. In the United Kingdom, our experience goes back to over one thousand years ago, and it was Norsemen who had settled on the north coast of France who formed William the Conqueror’s invasion force in 1066, not the French.
At the same time, Vikings were heading west across the Atlantic to Greenland, and they are thought to have settled in North America well before Christopher Columbus or the Pilgrim Fathers.
It's also clear from Lucy Ash’s new book ‘The Baton and The Cross’ that it was Nordic pioneers who first brought order to the area which is now Russia and Ukraine, and who originally accepted the arrival of Christian Orthodoxy from what was then Constantinople. Genghis Khan may have subsequently done much to inspire their descendants to extend their frontiers eastward, but it was the Nordic settlers who provided the original foundations.
So we should celebrate the subsequent conversion of a people whose heritage was making war for their real determination now to seek peace, with particular reference to Alfred Nobel, whose family history relates to both Sweden and Russia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The man who invented dynamite, and subsequently instituted the Nobel Peace Prize, is an example to humanity of the journey which we now need to take.
Of course, keeping fingers well clear of the nuclear button is not a sufficient answer for how to achieve peace: we need also to work hard at the measures that can be taken at a practical and governmental level. Our commentary of 30th October last year drew attention to some of these, and we have repeated on several occasions our call to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest the clear Christian instruction to love our enemy.
It must also be accepted that the male side of our species is almost wholly responsible for all this aggression. For example, there was something very unnerving about Ayatollah Khamenei leading prayers in Tehran recently: it wasn’t so much the words he spoke (which were to be expected) but his audience — a massive sea of middle-aged and old men, and hardly a young person, and definitely no women, to be seen.
It’s much the same in other warmongering nations, such as Russia and most other Middle Eastern countries.
Statista’s researcher Aaron O’Neill published his analysis last month of the number of countries where women have been in the highest positions of executive power between 1960 and 2024. Over this whole period, the highest position of executive power has been held by a woman in just 62 countries out of 193 member states, and currently that number is just 15. Meanwhile our prisons are full of men, not women — so it’s no wonder that humanity is so mired in conflict.
We must learn to step back from aggression, particularly when the tools at our disposal are so universally lethal. All nations need to sit up and listen to the strategic message which the Nobel Committee has sent: it cannot be an option to use nuclear weapons again, no matter what the circumstances.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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